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Edited on Mon Jul-20-09 04:20 PM by Deep13
I was a little more than two months old when Apollo 8 first went to the moon. I was a little more than a year and a half old when Apollo 11 landed there. I don't remember the landing but I have a vague memory of TV guide with an astronaut shaking hands with a moon man and of frogmen fishing an Apollo capsule out of the water. I remember my parents and my uncle talking about Apollo 13 running on battery power. I was five when the lunar program ended.
What I learned about NASA and about the space program came from books, discussions with adults who knew about it and a limited amount of TV when I was older than that. In first grade, I checked out What the Moon Astronauts Do from the school library about a dozen times. I was dismayed when I heard no one was going to the moon anymore. It didn't make sense to me. What are astronauts for if not for going to the moon?
The Apollo program and my voracious appetite for all things space-related sparked my interest in science and how things worked. I became a paleontologist at age six, just like every other little kid. A few years ago at the natural history museum, an old guy ask his small grandson whether the big allosaurus skeleton would eat the much smaller model of a peculiar looking critter. Grandpa! the kid said and proceeded to explain that allosaurs were Jurassic while the other critter was Cretaceous. Anyway, I was also interested in rocks and astronomy. I read about the planets in the 1970s. My Lego set was the lunar lander set. My poem in 4th grade was about life coming to the moon. My favorite little-kid past time was playing astronaut. I made a capsule in the corner of my room, put a rain hood on and picked up a small briefcase as that ventilator that astronauts wore when walking to the rocket. Favorite TV show: Jacques Cousteau. Favorite activity: snorkeling in the lake.
At the beginning of the 1980s I saw a soft-spoken guy on TV explain how we are all part of the Cosmos. Frankly, it blew my mind. We, humans, are made of atoms that were created in the unimaginably hot nuclear furnaces of stars. Some of those atoms had to be made by cataclysmic explosions of massive, dying stars. We are as close to the cosmos as the skin on our fingers. He explained it all with graphic examples. Molecules in our blood, dust in nebulae, an apple pie made of atoms, a meteor impact crater in AZ, a human face on a crab shell. And he pointed out how religion has opposed advancements in knowledge. In the companion book he asked if god made the universe, what made god? If god always existed, is it not easier to say the universe has always existed? He also explained what can go wrong in the world and his visions of nuclear winter kept me awake at night.
I became religious in the 1980s. I always had been to a degree, but my step-father's own conservative beliefs and his new focus on religion after joining Alcoholic Anonymous kind of made everyone else in the house religious too. I got caught up in the Bible and worried if I had somehow by thought or word pissed of the Holy Spirit and forever damned myself. But I could never fully accept the Bible for a very simple reason: I knew from Cosmos and science education that life forms evolve. Nothing I read or prayed for or believed could dislodge that basic fact from my mind. Since part of the Bible must be wrong, I soon found other parts that I hoped were wrong. It got to the point that the morning of my confirmation into the Episcopal Church that I had to ask one of the older members if we were required to believe everything in that book.
Anyway, my interest in science and biology in particular continued into high school when my lack of mathematical aptitude derailed any chance for a scientific education. I studied history in college, not science. History, was my second favorite subject. I had inherited an interest in politics from my Dad who looked at it the way he looked at sports. Still, I was always fascinated by new things being discovered, especially in astronomy. The correction of the Hubble's problems revealed awesome new discoveries. While in law school on a visit back East, I was bugging Dad on his tree farm about how I had read how dicey the Apollo 11 landing had been and just how dangerous it was to land a rocket where no one ever had been. I speculated how anyone had the nerve to do it. He look at me and said, "You would have." He didn't say much so little remarks like that stick out in my memory.
My Dad died in 1999 and partly to take my mind off of it I bought a telescope. I had been watching From the Earth to the Moon and remembered I did not have a small scope to get even a good look at the moon. Frankly, I was surprised at how much scope one could get for $500. The last one I had was a crappy little one with plastic lenses and an unusable tripod. Well, buying that scope in 2000 was a mistake. Now I have six of them, plus an unbelievable array of accessories. I've built two using commercial mirrors. I watched moons transit Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, the changing weather on Mars, clouds of gas where stars were being born and wisps of gas where they were dying. I've seen unimaginably distant galaxies and wondered who was there looking at ours. I watched the transit of Venus and the churning surface of our own star. I saw the annular eclipse in 1994 and the comet in 1996. And there was the moon. Canyons, craters of ever size, rugged mountains, smooth plains. Everyone really must look at the moon and Saturn through a good small telescope before he or she dies. Finally, I've come to see the processes of life on Earth as an extension of the vast cosmic workings. And I've explored alien places on Earth. Above the tree line on Mt. Rainier, one may as well be on the moon.
Maybe I would have done a lot of this stuff anyway. But it seems like my interest in science was started because I began life in a time of Homeric giants who reached for the moon and briefly grasped it before terrestrial gravity pulled them back to the ground.
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